Recently, the Internet Protocol (IP) has been extended from prior IPv4 addressing mechanisms to IPv6 addressing mechanisms to address the explosion in connected devices. While the new protocol promises greater expandability, there are security concerns that have not been fully addressed. For example, in IPv6 there are concerns that it is possible to attack the basic network protocols used in a ‘first hop’ or local subnet. Such protocols include router advertisements and neighbor discovery among others. Current solutions to this concern depend on public key infrastructure (PKI) keys to authenticate packets sent by routers and hosts on the subnet. However, this solution is not very scalable since each host needs to have a separate PKI key pair, and validation requires a validating entity to have access to the public keys of all hosts, which in turn requires access to a central repository/registrar. As such, there can be a high latency involved in any aspect of protocols having validation requirements.